Word: bilbo
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...going had been gummy. For seven grinding days, the Senate's three-man War Investigating Subcommittee had groped through a maze of epithets, gags, evasions and contradictory testimony to determine whether Mississippi's Senator Theodore Gilmore Bilbo had shaken down war contractors for campaign money and graft...
Even the Senate Campaign Expenditures Committee, which conducted the four-day hearing, had trouble keeping an inquisitorial face. Somehow, way down there in Mississippi, the investigation of ailing, aging Senator Theodore Gilmore Bilbo on charges of having coerced and intimidated Mississippi's Negroes not to vote seemed kind of silly...
...Best Way. .. ." Throughout the whole parade of 96 witnesses-most of them telling a tale of violence, jailing, bribery or "friendly advice" from white folks-only one piece of evidence connected the confident Bilbo with the fact that only 1,500 of Mississippi's 500,000 eligible Negroes had voted in July. That was one phrase, from a Bilbo campaign address in June: "The best way to keep a nigger away from a white primary in Mississippi is to see him the night before...
When the hearing was over, Bilbo, his five lawyers, the committee, and particularly Louisiana's Democratic Senator Allen Ellender, committee chairman and Bilbo buddy, seemed well satisfied. The committee returned to Washington to write a report. Few expected that it would recommend unseating the Senator...
...more hurdles to jump. The Senate War Investigating Committee said that it had well-documented evidence that Bilbo had accepted $100,000 in goods & services from Mississippi war contractors-and it wanted to find out about it. Senator Robert Taft had announced that the new Senate would inquire into Bilbo's qualifications. The Man might have a harder time laughing himself out of these probes...